


The Day The Earth Shook

by orphan_account



Category: Romeo And Juliet - All Media Types, Romeo And Juliet - Shakespeare
Genre: Earthquakes, Gen, Original Character Death(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-11
Updated: 2015-08-11
Packaged: 2018-04-14 04:46:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4551018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The day the earth shook was a day that Tybalt's world was changed forever. Written for Day Two of Romeo and Juliet Week.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Day The Earth Shook

The day the earth shook, Tybalt was not quite six years old.

The day the earth shook, the leaves were just beginning to fall from the trees; their bright green coloring which exuded life fading to a golden hue, and eventually to a plain, dead brown that always made Tybalt feel sad somehow. The day was quiet, and warm for fall; Tybalt could always remember hearing birds, singing in the trees, though they evaded his eyes whenever he tried to search for them.

The day the earth shook, Tybalt did not know where his parents were. As was so frequent, his father and mother had left him to be entertained by Juliet's nurse while they went out and about their own errands; Tybalt, personally, liked to think that he did not need looking after, and when he vocalized this to Nurse, she agreed with him. Juliet's parents had both gone away to Mantua for the weekend for business. Tybalt, hereby, took it upon himself to watch over his young cousin, who had only turned three a few months earlier, and her playmate Susan, the Nurse's own daughter.

The day the earth shook, they had been all together in the garden. Little Susan was across the yard, entertaining herself with some of the last remaining flowers of the dying summer; she plucked the blooms in her small fists, sprinkling them over her head and creating a halo of petals around where she sat. Tybalt had been paying little mind to Susan, however; all of his attention had been focused on Juliet. The little girl stubbornly persisted to attempt to sword fight with him, her tiny stick clutched tightly in both fists; she had taken a nasty fall the day before and sported a fresh bruise on her head for it, so Tybalt was reluctant to challenge her too much. But Juliet in her determination was not to be denied, and he found himself squaring off with her anyways- he always liked to let her win, just to see the smile on her face.

The day the earth shook, no one had expected it. There had been no warning; children playing in the streets were caught off guard, vendors and sellers could not move their wares in time, no one knew to take shelter. Had there been some warning, the devastation would not have been so great. Had there been a warning Tybalt would have insisted that Susan stay by their side, instead of so very far away. Tybalt's mother would not have left the store as early as she did, shopping bags clutched in both hands. Tybalt's father would have driven back into Verona, foot stressing the gas pedal of his car to near breakneck speeds, intent on finding his family before catastrophe struck. But there was no warning. No one knew. No one guessed.

No one could have guessed.

The day the earth shook, the first thing Tybalt knew was that the ground was trembling. That wasn’t normal; the world wasn’t supposed to shake like this. He had never known anything like it before. Juliet fell to the ground, landing hard on her rear, and Tybalt followed a few seconds later; yet it wasn’t until he heard the Nurse give out an alarmed scream that he realized something was wrong. Something was _dangerous_ , and Juliet’s eyes were wide and scared as she looked at him.

He reacted before he could think about what he was doing; promptly picking up the tiny Juliet by the back of her dress, he tossed her into her Nurse’s arms. Juliet let out a wail that didn’t die down even in the familiar embrace of her nurse. The portly woman, her arms suddenly full of frightened toddler, could do little but turn and run to shelter inside the house.

Tybalt automatically made to follow after them; but in an instant his mind turned to someone else. He had forgotten Susan across the yard. She had been left with her flowers, and no one had been there to help her.

He turned back, struggling across the yard even as the earthquake seemed intent on throwing him off his feet; but as he reached the flower bushes he realized with dismay that Susan, in her little pink dress, her red hair strewn with petals, had vanished. She had always been an easily frightened child; if she had gotten scared and run off somewhere she deemed safe, Tybalt would not have been surprised.

Servants dashed around him, running back and forth in a panic that he himself, however stunned and frightened as he was, couldn’t seem to feel. Susan was gone; he had to look for her.

But the shaking was only growing more violent, Susan was nowhere to be found, and his thoughts and body kept being drawn back to Juliet. He ran through the yard, slipping through bushes and stumbling over his own feet as he called Susan’s name, desperate for even a glimpse of red and pink, or a trace of flower petals on the ground. There was nothing to be found; nothing to be seen.

When a scream split the air, he would have recognized it anywhere as Juliet’s; in an instant, all thoughts of Susan fled his mind as he raced back to the house. He entered the kitchen, wide-eyed and empty handed, and the first thing he saw was Juliet and her nurse huddled under the kitchen table. Juliet’s face was scrunched up and buried in the Nurse’s chest, her hair tangled and fists balled up in fright, but she was okay and that mattered to Tybalt more than anything else. He didn’t realize he was trembling until he had joined them under the table; or even that there were tears running down his cheeks.

The day the earth shook, it seemed to last forever. To Tybalt, it felt as if it took hours, hours and hours of huddling under that table as things collapsed around them and people screamed, loud and long and agonized into the air, before at last silence- and with it, peace- fell. Tybalt felt the Nurse’s warm hold around him tighten, and they all wept. Even at that moment, Tybalt had not considered that anyone could have died. With the silence that fell- which, he later realized, should have seemed to silent- it dawned on them all that they had no idea what they would see when they walked out of that kitchen.

The day the earth shook, as a little boy huddled with his cousin and her Nurse under a table, a woman, her arms heavy with shopping bags, was walking through the streets of Verona’s marketplace when she was suddenly tossed off her feet. All around her, people screamed; things fell, things shattered, and as she tried to scramble to her feet she was seized by the panic of the situation. So many people ran that day, in any direction they could think to get away from what they feared to be certain death; she was one of them. For a time she found shelter in one of the clothing stores she had just left; her mind was filled with thoughts of her husband, her child, and- ironically- the shopping bags she had abandoned in the street. She had thought, as the shaking had died down, that she was safe; and then the aftershock had hit. Glass shattered; shelves collapsed; and when everything was stable once more horrified refugees tried desperately to revive the woman, who had found herself at the bottom of it all. She did not wake; she never would.

The day the earth shook- later in the day, when night had nearly fallen- Tybalt walked hand in hand with his father into the cool silver room that seemed, even to his childish mind, to exude a sense of wrongness. He felt afraid in here, but he refused to show it; instead, he merely tightened his grip on his father’s hand as the man in the white coat showed them to the long silver table, where a white sheet was cast over something. Tybalt caught sight of finely manicured nails as his father took a pale hand in his own; dark hair hung over the side of the table, and for an instant he was reminded sharply of his mother. He could not longer help himself; his face crumpled, and he began to sob.

The day after the earth shook, their house was silence, and Tybalt refused to leave his room. That night, his father stumbled into his bedroom, his hand in a disarray; he reeked strongly of something Tybalt could not identify but didn’t like, and he cringed backwards as the man advanced on him. He did not understand what was happening, but he let out a cry when his father raised his hand; his chin was grabbed, sharply, fingers digging into his skin, and Tybalt rebelled for a moment against the fierce hold before going still to gaze into his father’s eyes.

“You,” the man said, and every one of his words seemed to hang heavy in the air around Tybalt as he spoke, decorating the room in darkness, “do not cry. You are a man; you are a warrior. You never cry. If you do, you are weak.”

Tybalt blinked at him, dark eyes- the very mirror of his mother’s, right down to their curved shape and thick, dark eyelid- wide. “What… happened to mother?”

The grip on his chin was relinquished in an instant. “She’s not coming back,” spat his father, turning on his heel. His movements were heavy and slow, as if he were weighed down by a thousand invisible burdens. “But we do not shed tears. Crying is for those weaker than us. We do not show our emotions; we put them into our fists, or into our screams, and we fight. That is who we are.”

The door shut behind him. Tybalt was left in silence.


End file.
